Clay Shirky suggests, perhaps only somewhat cynically, that "social software is stuff that gets spammed." I've tried to be an optimist in this regard, but the evidence has certainly seemed to coalesce in his favor during the past few weeks, first with the rapidly-aborted LA Times Wikitorial. Doomsayers have begun to predict its occurance in just the past few days with Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0.
Search Engine Watch's Danny Sullivan, among others, is calling it Tag Spam:
Danny found that, with about fifteen minutes of work, he was able to force 'rio karma' and 'mp3 player' into the 'link cloud' zeitgeist.
Steve Rubel's catch at Micro Persuasion tries to drag the Tag Spam from the realm of theoretical. He points to 'crapware', one of the most popular of Y!'s more than 34,000 tags so far, which as of this posting has 898 pages associated with it. These are practically all link-spam type pages, although one wonders whether that's the meaning of 'crapware' in the first place. Steve et al, is it possible that this tag is meant as a type of blacklist? Hmm...
Chung-Man Tam, Yahoo's project manager for MyWeb 2.0, responds on the Yahoo Search Blog that "I might not understand that tag (nor even like it), but if they find it useful I say go ahead and tag away." Of course, the whole idea of a social tagging web is that we share links with those we trust, and potentially ignore those we distrust. But what about the 'commons' universe of 'Everybody's Links'?
Here's hoping the Doomsayers turn out to be wrong.
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